TNW Sites

YouTube autocomplete suggests disturbing incestuous searches

BuzzFeed News reports that several users found YouTube’s site and app autocompleting search queries starting with ‘how to have’ with disturbing suggestions, including ‘s*x with your kids’, over the weekend.

YouTube said in a statement that it’s removed that autocomplete result and similar ones, and is investigating how they cropped up in the first place.

Thankfully, it doesn’t appear that the suggestions are indicative of numerous related videos on the company’s streaming platform; rather, it’s being speculated that the specific autocomplete results may have been part of a planned campaign by trolls. Google has previously noted that its autocomplete prediction algorithms take into account popular search queries, and so it stands to reason that a group of malicious actors could have banded together and entered the aforementioned search term several times in order to have it surface when others used the site to look up ‘how to have…’.